How Good Design Can Make Cheap Cars Seem Less Cheap

Do you ever notice how every couple of years we seem to keep having the same conversations? A discussion bubbles up through the noise that feels eerily familiar – a sort of debate deja-vu. Didn’t we talk about this thing a while back? Last week I again bore witness to the meaning of Paul Verhoeven’s fascist satire Starship Troopers being misinterpreted by people whose media literacy is as deep French autoroute service area toilet pan.

The automotive community has its own dead horses it likes to drag out and re-flog from time to time. Cars are too fat. Cars all look the same. Cars are too complicated. Cars are all crossovers. Designers are all lazy (ouch). Right now you’re shouting your own bête noire at the screen. There’s always something wrong with the metal filling today’s showrooms, and if it were sorted out then we’d all be driving in a utopia of lollipops and free gas.

This week’s conversation we’re having for the umpteenth time is that new cars are too expensive. One section of the automotive hive minds thinks OEMs should be making hair shirts on wheels: simple tin cans with a minimum of features that sell for fifteen thousand dollars. Yes, I’m sure a heated steering wheel represents the very height of bourgeoisie decadence. Unless you happen to live in Frozen Bollock, Alaska at which point it becomes very much a necessity. The problem with this argument is normal car buyers don’t want hand cranked windows, single DIN stereos, plastic wheel trims and perma-fogged glazing. Cars are a visible manifestation of our personality; nobody wants to look stingy, even if they are.

The Car (Prices) Are Too Damn High!

A lot of context gets stripped out of these discussions about purchase price. Average transaction prices for new cars continue their inexorable march skywards, making new cars feel more expensive than they have ever been. The market has expanded and proliferated into niches-inside-niches. There are more cars than ever available at this $50k price point – because that’s where the business is. Funky financing arrangements and artificially low interest rates make money go further than ever, enticing customers into more expensive cars than they would otherwise choose.

There’s also the thorny issue of what is known in marketing as ‘the value proposition.’ The idea in consumers’ minds that a certain product should cost a specific amount – whether this figure is arrived at arbitrarily, a long-standing price promotion, or an unreliable memory of what things used to cost. I see gamers complaining about the price of AAA titles now costing $60 – while forgetting or not knowing that back in the early nineties Super Nintendo cartridges cost $59.99 and sometimes more, which now works out to $136. Adjusted for inflation, a Miata costs less today than it did at launch in 1990, and you’re getting a modern car that won’t turn you into a pork milkshake when you get side-swiped by a semi. So while the perception is cars cost a lot more today, the reality is wages haven’t kept pace, making everything feel more expensive.

We can play the inflation game all afternoon, and I’ve got a whole article to pad out so let’s do that. From the shelves of my wood paneled library I have next to me a selection of old American and British car magazines. In the dusky pages of the May 1969 issue of Car And Driver is a price list for all cars available that year. The cheapest domestic car is the AMC Rambler two door sedan at $1,998 ($17,294 in 2025), with a little symbol next to it denoting you will be suffering the indignity of a six cylinder engine. The cheapest imported car is the Austin America, yours for $1,765 ($15,277), which was probably deliberately priced to undercut the Beetle 1500 at $1,799 ($15,571).

Close enough together, but all three cars approached low purchase price motoring in different ways. The Rambler was a three-quarter scale traditional American sedan in its final year of production. The Austin America was a federalized version of the billion-selling BMLC ADO16, an advanced hydraulically suspended Pininfarina design – its lower cost was helped by pound sterling cratering in 1967. The Beetle was an anachronism turned into an anti-establishment icon by counterculture acceptance and a groundbreaking advertising campaign that was cheap because it had been on sale for donkey’s years. Europeans designed and engineered small cars for themselves that coincidentally could be sold in America for the parsimonious. Detroit took the big cars they knew, gutted the joy out of them and turned the shrink ray on them to make them cheaper.

Moving through the decades, because you’re a penny pinching masochist in 1974 handing your local British Leyland importer $2,949 ($19k in 2025) would put a set of Marina keys in your hand and all its oil on your driveway. Strike loving British line workers and their American cousins around this time built cars by lovingly smashing them together, but by the early eighties the fastidious Japanese had turned up. In 1982, a check for $5,695 ($19k) bought you a Mazda GLC Custom with a four speed plus overdrive gearbox. Remember that 1990 Euro Escort Popular I drove a couple of years back? That came with a four-speed box and no cassette player yet still retailed for the equivalent of £19k.

How To Build A Cheap Car

Before we start discussing how clever design can make cars cheaper to buy, it’s important to understand the role they played for manufacturers. Cars that are cheap to buy and run were traditionally seen by OEMs as necessary to retain (or gain) market share at lower price points and to give customers an entry point into the range, something which customers respond to less in the modern era. Thanks to the internet, they have much more information available and more ways to buy cars – no longer are you restricted to what the local dealer has in stock, and brand loyalty can’t be taken for granted.

Small cars did not always earn money. The legend goes that when the Mini appeared in 1959, Ford couldn’t believe BMC were making any money on the little car. After pulling one apart, costing it, and concluding BMC weren’t, Ford went and designed the Cortina. Likewise, the Renault 4 with its odd semi-monocoque construction was labor intensive to build and took years to make a profit.

According to the book “Let’s Call It Fiesta” Ford spent billions of dollars in the seventies designing and developing the Fiesta solely because they predicted to lose market share in Europe, which was already turning towards low cost transverse engine hatchbacks. When the initial design studies were carried out, the Detroit proposal for a super cheap Ford was to shorten the European RWD Escort – because hacking up a bigger car was the only way America knew how to do it. It didn’t provide the necessary savings to allow the car to be sold at a lower price than the Escort and the packaging was horrible. Ford did not have the experience of a company like Fiat, for whom cheap cars were their bread and butter.

When Fiat wanted to replace the original 500, they commissioned Italian design legend Giugiaro to produce something that was not only cheap to buy, but crucially cheap to build. The Panda ended up with flat panels, flat glass that was symmetrical side to side, and a minimal interior. As functional a piece of car design as there has ever been, the industrial beauty of these little boxes makes me weep – but such a spartan car would be a hard sell in 2025. The way to do it these days is shown by the current 500 – boutique appeal, a £17k ($22k) starting price, and sell the same car for 17 years with only modest updates as necessary.

Closer to the present day, the Ford (again) Maverick hit the showrooms with a headline $20k starting price. Possibly because Ford underpriced it, the first year of production was sporadic and there are currently no 2024 Mavericks listed at less than $26k. This represents another reason for making a cheap car – lure customers into the showroom with a low starting price and then upsell them to a higher spec model. As a marketing strategy, this comes unglued when the super cheap version is what people want to buy, as Ford found out. The exact opposite happened in the UK when Dacia landed the bare-bones Duster crossover. It came in appliance white, had steel wheels and unpainted bumpers, windy windows and a startling price of £8,995 (£14k in 2025). They sold about three and these ‘Access’ trim levels were soon withdrawn. If nothing else, this highlights the difference between American customers who tend to fixate on price and European customers who tend to focus on image and features.

I’ve just been on the Chevrolet website and adding alloy wheels to a base model 2025 Trax (because style doesn’t take a day off even if I’m poor) comes to $22,790. It has electric windows all round, wireless phone CarPlay/Android Auto, single zone climate, cloth seats with a 60/40 split rear, USB ports, steering wheel controls, tinted glass, power mirrors and automatic headlights. I can even get a black one without paying extra. It’s even decent to drive. This is a ridiculous bargain and there would be nothing to be saved by stripping these features out. Customers simply wouldn’t buy the car. I appreciate there is an inflation adjusted price delta between 1969 and 2025 of seven or so thousand dollars, but you are getting so much more for your money. Nonetheless, the argument persists that cars have too much stuff in them, and that somehow by yanking out a few hundred dollars worth of electronic parts will magically knock thousands of dollars off the list price of a new car.

There are a lot of complex factors to account for when calculating how much it costs to build a car, but you are dealing with two things. Fixed costs that don’t change whether you sell one car or a million: R&D, operational expenses (keeping the lights on), marketing (advertising costs the same no matter how many cars you sell) and so on. Then there are variable costs: the Bill of Materials (the cost of all the parts that make up the car), labor (how much is needed for a particular vehicle), and things like shipping that increase the more you sell. This is all a gross simplification that ignores the impact of things like currency fluctuations between markets, and I’m sure one of our lovely readers who knows more than me will chime in in the comments, but you get the basic idea. You need a doctorate from the Institute of Moneyology to fully understand the economics of building cars and it’s all closely guarded confidential business information. I know roughly what the BoM is for an L663 Defender, but you couldn’t waterboard that information out of me because I want to see the inside of an OEM design studio again at some point. But I can say another car I was working on with an early six-figure starting price lost its automatically retracting rear spoiler because a competitor vehicle removed theirs. Even at that level, cars are still ruthlessly costed. The thing to bear in mind is at the bottom the margins are thin to non-existent: as the CEO of Autopian Motors you are hopefully making it up on volume or by upselling to more profitable trim levels. Although none of this applies to an exotic OEM like Ferrari, which remains the most profitable per unit car company on the planet.

How Good Design Can Help Keep Costs Down

So to make a car where a lower purchase price is part of the design brief, how can humble car designers influence the outcome? The design process comes under the fixed costs part of the equation: the OEM already has the studio, the equipment, and the staff all bought and paid for – but there is still opportunity cost to consider. Could the design team be working on something more profitable instead? Back in the eighties, even Ford only had enough design and development resources to design and build either one of a mid-engined supercar or a rugged off-road family car notionally categorized as a ‘sport utility vehicle’ – what would become the Explorer.

The main thing to try and do is sketch something simple. This has two outcomes; fewer trim parts means less tooling costs and fewer different materials needed. The Dacia Sandero I reviewed used the same grain of plastic for all the main interior parts. Secondly, simpler parts are quicker and easier to model digitally, meaning less revisions for production feasibility and quicker sign off for release to suppliers. Crucially simpler parts are cheaper to make – easier to stamp or pop out of the molding machine. The more steps and processes you need to produce a part, the more expensive it becomes.

Let’s have a closer look at Ford’s bargain baby. Feature lines are added to panels to stop them drumming and help the metal hold its shape when stamped. On the Maverick bodywork they are kept to a minimum–there are hardly any extraneous feature lines making these panels easier and cheaper to tool up for  At the front, there appear to be a total of only nine parts: two headlights, the grille, the crossbar, the Ford badge, the bumper, the lower bumper and two orange marker lights. All the shapes are straightforward, unfussy and uncomplicated. There’s no molding on the bodyside, just a simple plastic cladding piece on the rocker. If you can find one, boggo twenty three grand Mavericks come with steel wheels, but moving up to the XLT gets you alloys. The wheel design itself is chunky with lots of material in the area where the spokes meet the rim. This means they are easier to forge because there are no intricate spoke patterns to test the pattern maker’s sanity, and such a simple design wouldn’t have required rounds of tedious remodeling because it kept failing Finite Element Analysis testing.

You can see this fewer, simpler parts approach in the original 2010 Duster. This car was built on Renault’s B platform from 2002, so it’s a pretty good bet that was well paid off. What I want to use this car to illustrate is how the doors are full height stampings that go all the way up to the cant rail. This massively simplifies the bodyside stamping and cleverly makes the leading edge of the front door the cap of the A pillar, saving additional parts. The car pictured is the only image of the 2010 model still on the Dacia media pages and this is definitely not the £8,995 version – but note the lack of black trim on the B pillar and where the side mirror mounts to the door. This probably saved a dollar on each car, but when you sell 2.3 million worldwide in nine years, it soon adds up.

And that highlights the final piece of the building cars at lower cost puzzle. Ford gets away with not exporting the Maverick because the North American market is big enough to sustain the necessary volumes without the additional expense of making it EuroNCAP compliant and engineering right hand drive versions. The current base model Dacia Duster (which comes with steel wheels again now they are fashionable) starts at £18,850 ($24,357) on the road, including taxes is built in Romania, Brazil, Colombia, Russia and Nigeria – all low labor cost countries.

So yes, with some clever design thinking, leveraging of your global footprint, using common platforms and as many existing components as possible, you can build a car with an advertised price near $20k, although spending just a few thousand more will give you a lot more options. But $15k isn’t realistically possible because cars have not been that cheap for nigh on fifty years. Sorry Torch.

Top graphic images: Ford; Dacia; RK Motors

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